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Friday, 29 November 2013

Why Academia is Poisonous

When yous stare intae dat abyss, the abyss stares back ken.

Been reading The Rawness as of late ken, in particular some of his posts on ego superiority and making that plastic, doughy, false makeup, presenting yourself as being the smartest fucker in the room, rather than being the smartest fucker in the room. I talked about in other posts how I allowed this to fuck me up in terms of coming up with excuses for my failures, "oh, I'm not so bright" etc, which whether or that is true is beside the point, it is the fact that I thought like this that stopped me from trying. I accept it, and more importantly I feel it as well, but there is more going on here than meets the eye.

To sum up, I really fucked this bastard up.

So I used to be good at the field I'm in ken. Really good. Yet, since I got into this masters yokeamebob, I've turned into the shittiest, most useless student ever. Now, a part of me is cognizant of the fact that a lot of this was protecting my ego from damage, the material is more difficult so I don't want to say I'm dumb, thick as shit, I'd rather say I'm lazy cause that remains all sunshine and gravy en aw. This still remains true. But then, I realized what I've been doing with the course content all of this time.

I've been using it as an intellectual crutch.

When yous end up in academia, you tend to come across roughly three kinds of people and when I mean academia, I mean from masters level plus at a half decent university. The first two types are cool enough people, the third type is beyond toxic, and that third type is me, or at least it used to be. The third type of person is what makes The Cathedral so unbelievably dangerous as well and is the most problematic. So let's get to it. This is the type that populates academia the most alas, and the reason academia can be such twisty shark invested waters.

Type 1: The highly intelligent person who tends to be utterly indifferent/possibly hate with a passion the subject in question, but is just in there to make ends meet, get a slightly nicer job, nothing more and nothing less. This type is slightly depressing in that they feel yous could be doing better, but at least they are up front about it. Relatively harmless kind of person.

Type 2: The somewhat intelligent to highly intelligent person who is enthralled and in love with his field of study and wants as much knowledge on the subject as possible. These people tend often to be passionate, sometimes aspergery and nerdy, odd, but again, relatively harmless, more open kind of people when it comes to matters academia related.

Then we have type three.

Type 3: The somewhat intelligent to highly intelligent person who is indifferent towards the study, but who has co-dependency/narcissistic issues. So, that person uses the subject as a way to prop himself up, to look intelligent rather than be intelligent.

So I realized, perhaps subconsciously, that I don't give a fuck about my subject. I have no passion for it, no love for it. I was, all this time, using it as an intellectual crutch, while pretending to love it. So while I was failing at the game of life miserably, I poured my time into all these maths equations, trying to outnerd all these other failed excuses of men, all these losers who had no pussy, no passion, no stories, just differential equations and resonance and the fucking course, yeah, whatever. That's all it was. Ego nourishment. I didn't realize because I was just playing a desperate game of passively aggressively outshine the other guy with no real substance to it. I never saw myself as being the pathetic fuck that I was. Type ones and twos escape this, but the type threes cluster together, and then yous think you have a friend, but whambam, that guy failed and a cunt feels all gooey inside. Not healthy ken. Yet, over the past year or so, I've been able to recognize more womanly, "gamma" tendencies in those around me, and quite frankly it is revolting to see. The passive aggressive behaviour. The putting on the pedestal of shoddy women with flatulence issues. All of it. The problem with this as well is that you can't escape this toxicity. It rubs off on you. That classic bit of advice, yous are the average of your best five friends, no truer words spoken ken.

So back to The Cathedral. Toxic people, study, building up their fragile little ego. Since their definition of "Billy" is "Billy is smart cause he knows quaternion calculus", or "Billy is smart because he read the whole of In Search of Lost Time", what happens when some cheeky cunt comes along and tears apart your world view?

You take it as an attack on you, cause you're so fucken golden amirite?

I love the following video:

This is exactly what I'm talking about here. Schwarz is highly respectful towards Paul Krugman, and at the same time carefully, cleanly, cleverly dismantles his argument. Ninja motherfucker them Spanish lads. But the fat bearded forgetting to wipe his balls, Foundation loving tit starts freaking out by the end of the video. Amygdala blaring and all that shit, fucken beautiful ken. Type ones would go "yeah whatever you say man, fuck them bitches". Type twos would debate passionately and conceit if they were incorrect or not. Type threes are whiny Paul Krugman bitches.

For STEM, this is not the worst thing. But the social sciences and economics?

This is what I think happens:

1: You have the three types. Type ones drop out. You're left with type twos and threes.

2: Type twos get bullied out by the type threes.

3: Type threes dominate academia. Their ideas are the ideas of the day. Only way to join them is to be one of them in the same shitstorm. Cue ridiculous bullshit like neoclassical economics or "cisgender" privilege. So, when their ideas come under attack, they see it as an attack on themselves, academia being the shit flinging fireworks show that it is, and grasp onto their beliefs even more than ever before.

Paul Krugman, little bitch, grasps his ideas with as tight a grasp as possible. He pollutes people with the nonsense in his article, and thus the cycle continues on and on.

Doing something because you enjoy it for the sake of it, or because of purely pragmatic reasons is all and dandy, but the second yous put on a façade, the wall crumbles. I'm a type one now, but on the other hand I'm not going to give myself excuses as before. Get be on with it ken. Being able to identify one's weaknesses is the only way to properly move forward, with a smile, drink and hot lassie in tow.